Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
"We hopes your honour will excuse us, if we've taken a minute or two to work out this here traverse, and reduce it to plain sailing; but the purposal as your honour has laid athwart our hawse fetched us all up standin' just at first, and it warn't until we'd had time to pay off, and gather way on t'other tack, as I may say, that we was able to get the bearins of it.
It was tit-for-tat for a while with splinters flying and neither of us in the eye of advantage, but at last the Araminta shot away the main-mast and wheel of the Niobe, and she wallowed like a tub in the trough of the sea. We bore down on her, and our carronades raked her like a comb. Then we fell thwart her hawse, and tore her up through her bowline-ports with a couple of thirty-two-pounders.
About an hour before sun-down, having stowed our water casks, we commenced getting under weigh, and were not a little while about it; for we were in thirty fathoms water, and in one of the gusts which came off shore had let go our other bow anchor; and as the southerly wind draws round the mountains and comes off in uncertain flaws, we were continually swinging round, and had thus got a very foul hawse.
A light sea breath wafted us to the anchorage, a mile from the town, and when the anchor dropped from the bows and the chain ran through the hawse pipe, it was sweet music to my ears; for the strain had been great, and I felt years older than when I parted from my messmates.
Well, he is the master; I shall not force my way where I am not welcome"; but after these spirited words he hung his head. "Oh, nonsense," said Eve. "It isn't him. There are mischief-makers behind." "Ay? just you tell me who they are. I'll teach them to come across my hawse"; and David's eyes flashed. "Don't you be silly," said Eve, and turned it off; "and don't be so downhearted.
It was tit-for-tat for a while with splinters flying and neither of us in the eye of advantage, but at last the Araminta shot away the main-mast and wheel of the Niobe, and she wallowed like a tub in the trough of the sea. We bore down on her, and our carronades raked her like a comb. Then we fell thwart her hawse, and tore her up through her bowline-ports with a couple of thirty-two-pounders.
They saw Mobile Point a semicircle of darting fire, and the Brooklyn "athwart the Hartford's hawse"; but they did not see, atom-small, perched high in the rigging of the flag-ship and demanding from the decks below, "why this?" and "why that?" a certain "plain sailor" well known to New Orleans and the wide world; did not see the torpedoes lying in watery ambush for him, nor hear the dread tale of them called to him from the Brooklyn while his ship passed astern of her, nor him command "full speed ahead" as he retorted, "Damn the torpedoes!"
A'ter Ben was gone, Poll makes her appearance, and when she finds Ben wasn't in the tap, says, `Young woman, did a man go upstairs just now? `Yes, replied the bar-girl, `with his wife, I suppose; they be turned in this quarter of an hour. When she almost turned mad with rage, and then as white as a sheet, and then she burst into tears, and runs out of the house, crying out, `Poor misfortunate creature that I am! knocking everything down undersized, and running into the arms of every man who came athwart her hawse."
She keeps her, as I tell her, within the sweep of her own hawse, Sir Gervaise." "So much the wiser she, Master Dutton," returned the admiral, pointedly. "The best pilot for a young woman is a good mother; and now you have a fleet in your roadstead, I need not tell a seaman of your experience that you are on pilot-ground; hey! Atwood?"
Toward eight bells in the afternoon watch we sighted another sail a schooner this time; she was beating up to the eastward, and crossed the hawse of the barque at no great distance, exchanging signals with her, although what was their nature we could not see, and even had we been near enough to have made out the flags, it is exceedingly improbable that we should have understood them.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking